Tag: Holland

A winter warmer at Rotterdam’s best cafe

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* I’ve been away in Rotterdam for my first assignment of the year. I’ll be posting some personal asides from the commissions during these trips. This is the first.

Follow me on Twitter, or subscribe to the RSS, for weekly updates from my travel-writing archive in the year to come.

I met an old friend again last week.

It’s been a few years since I was last in Rotterdam but they hadn’t aged a day.

Dudok, my favourite Rotterdam café, is buzzing with the gentle hum of chatter and the delicate clink of coffee cups – even at 4pm on a wintery Monday.

Located in the central-north Laurenskwartier, Dudok is named after the architect Willem Dudok, who designed the imposing building with its Art Deco-style facade [pictured above].

Inside, three giant photos of local businesses and a cast-iron, retro clock above the door dominate the high-ceilinged room.

I pull up a chair at the central reading table and peruse the rack of magazines, choosing between an Arcade Fire interview in Oor magazine and Trent Reznor on Johnny Cash in the latest copy of Electronic Beats.

Across the way, a group of ladies at leisure are tucking into the high tea of sandwiches and patisserie.

Nearer me, several bearded, intellectual types are stroking their chins while pouring over the politics sections of the daily newspapers.

At the other end of the reading table, a multiple-pierced student looks to be finishing her college assignment while riding the free Wi-Fi.

As dark clouds gather outside over the tram-lined boulevards, I happily work my way along the shelf of Euro pop-culture magazines over cups of milky coffee.

But, also, I love the traditional Dutch apple pie, served warm with cinnamon ice cream. The mix of crumbly pastry and soft filling, tinged with cinnamon and spiced with plump raisons, is as classy as I remember it.

The food even comes with a little edible label: “Dudok original.”

For a traveller alone in the city, Dudok feels like home.

Do you have a favourite bolt hole in Rotterdam? Or can you recommend another place-visit place in Holland? Post below.

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Dudok

Rotterdam tourism

Visit Holland

Dutch Lifestyle travel writing awards 2013

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I’ve won a travel-writing prize.

I’m delighted to say that I picked up the award for Best Article about a Dutch Icon at the annual Taste the Dutch Lifestyle Travel Writer Awards last month.

The awards were organised to honour UK journalists who have written outstanding articles about Holland in 2012.

The winning piece was Holland on a Plate, published in The Daily Express in July 2012.

Here’s an extract:

Farmer’s wife Corrie Balthus greets me with a white-plastic apron and a cheese mould.

She’s been up since six, making cheese in her rustic kitchen at Zeilzicht farm as she has every Friday for over 30 years.

“You need all five senses to make high-quality cheese,” she says, cutting into a eight-year-aged Gouda with a knife more like a sabre.

“You look at the colour and form, listen for the sweetness, crumble and smell it in your hand, and then taste it.”

More about the awards from the press section of Holland.com.

Liked this? Read about another win – the Golden Pen award from the Croatian National tourist Board.

And post your comments below.

Benelux: More to food than fries and waffles

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Think the Benelux countries. Think food. What comes to mind? Chips and waffles? A smoke and a pancake?

This summer I’ll be heading across the Benelux region to disprove these very myths.

The Benelux Economic Union formally came into being in 1944 but, historically, there’s a common heritage of local produce and traditional recipes to bond the three Benelux countries together.

And, as part of a new joint initiative between the Holland, Flanders and Luxembourg tourist boards, they’re ready to tell the world there’s more to lowland Europe than hackneyed stereotypes.

Traditional Benelux recipes, such as salt water fish waterzooi (a broth of fish and eggs) and Hustepot (braised pig trotters), have been passed down the generations from the Middle Ages. They draw on the farming tradition and seasonal produce of the region.

We still find them today but, in a region increasingly known for Michelin-starred restaurants, organic markets and celebrity chefs, they come with a contemporary twist – a common heritage blended with external influences.

That’s the angle I’m planning to explore.

It’s not the first time I’ve covered this region from a food angle. I’ve just writen a piece for The Independent about the cheese trail in Holland (watch this space for more details) and I wrote a story for the Financial Times a few years ago about the frituur culture (pictured above) of Flanders.

Here’s an extract – there’s no working link online:

The Flanders region of northern Belgium is home to the very finest frituurs, a simple, informal eatery and a Belgian institution, where master friars prepare superior fries and serve them in a paper cone. The best fries are prepared from Belgian Bintje potatoes, cut to a length of 11mm and fried twice for extra crispiness.

Antwerp alone boasts over 200 frituurs and they are seen as a place where people from walks of life can come together amongst Formica tables and plastic sauce dispensers to chew the fat.

“As a country with no obvious symbols of nationalism, the humble and improvised frituur is our only symbol. It reflects the ad-hoc nature of the Belgian personality, our indifference to aesthetics,” says Paul Ilegems, an art historian, who has devoted 25 years of his life to collecting images of the fried potato throughout history.

“Fries are originally Belgian with the term ‘French fries’ a corruption of the word,” he explains, handing me copies of his books to browse, amongst them Frietgeheimen (Secrets of the Fries) and Het Volkomen Frietboek (The Complete Fries Book). “The American slang term ‘to French’, meaning to cut into thin strips, was only brought to Europe by American troops after World War I,” he adds.

Keep reading for more details of commissions and trip plans. Meanwhile, please post your favourites place, top foodie tips and suggestions for places to visit or dishes to sample below.

I’d love to crowdsource some suggestions.

Story of the week: Eco-clubbing in Rotterdam

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* This is the third post in a new weekly series, highlighting old stories from my travel-writing archive. I’m running them here in full. Subscribe to this blog for more.

The opening night at Catwalk and the dancefloor is heaving. A jazz saxophonist plays a solo beyond the soft-leather booths of the bar while the DJ booth on wheels is pushed towards the back wall to open up more space for clubbers keen to throw a few shapes.

Formerly a pedestrian underpass converted into a seal-in, subterranean club, this was once the domain of rubbish and dirty needles. Today it’s home to Rotterdam’s beautiful crowd sipping mojitos and grooving to urban soul tunes. It’s also the latest opening among the city’s new breed of eco-clubs recycling old public spaces for cool new nightlife.

Rotterdam is already Holland’s premier clubbing city with 10,000 revellers regularly hitting the dancefloor each weekend to catch house and electronica sets by local DJs, such as Speedy J and Michel de Hey.

Every summer, around 400,000 people attend the Heineken Fast Forward Dance Parade, Rotterdam’s answer to Berlin’s Love Parade. But, more importantly, Rotterdam is the first European city to embrace the idea that clubbing can be a means to promote sustainability.

“Rotterdam is a great breeding ground for sustainable projects as it has a young population and a culture of collaboration between different groups,” says Michel Smit, founder of the Rotterdam Electronic Music Festival, held annually in November. “People want to go out but not be lectured about how to live their lives. By making sustainability cool, we can get the message across to a wider audience.”

Across town in the Delfshaven area, the people behind Worm, a multi-purpose arts space with a club, arthouse cinema, record shop and creative studio, are busy organising a new gallery event. I’m met at the door by Mike van Gaasbeek, an erstwhile squatter turned eco-visionary with an electric-shock hairstyle and a business card that reads ‘Chef de ping ping’ (that’s Dutch slang for ‘cash’).

“We opened in November 2005 with a plug-and-play construction to slot into disused, empty buildings using 90 per cent recycled materials and without even knocking in a single nail,” he grins.

Today, when people go clubbing at Worm, the walls are recycled from old estate agents’ boards, the toilets from old oil drums and the door handles from old bicycle handlebars. The only non-recycled items are the fire safety doors and emergency exit signs.

“This is the piece de resistance,” says Mike, ushering me into the cinema. The room is filled with car seats recycled from old Volkswagen Passat vehicles. “Really comfy,” he winks.

What will really put Rotterdam on the map as the green clubbing capital of Europe, however, is a project called the Sustainable Dance Club. From a nondescript office block in a leafy suburb of the city, developers Enviu are drawing up a masterplan to take eco-clubbing to the world.

The project is the brainchild of Stef van Dongen, who founded Enviu as a community of young professionals to facilitate start-ups based on environmental principles. Working in collaboration with architects Doll and Professor Han Brezet of the Delft University of Technology, he unveiled the project at Rotterdam’s Off-Corso nightclub last October.

The company has allocated a budget of €550,00 to prepare a small-scale dancefloor as a test project for an existing club venue. They then hope to take the template to major European festivals, such as Roskilde in Denmark and Glastonbury in the UK.

“A nightclub uses 150 times the energy of an average household and produces around 12,000l of glass to recycle from bottles and glasses each weekend,” says Stef. “I was out clubbing one night when the idea came to me to make a self-sustaining club that is mobile to plug into existing spaces.”

“At the launch we had intelligent LED lighting systems, rainwater-flush toilets, a water purification system to turn urine into drinking water (a brand new water treatment system developed for the project), a café using recycled food (they use leftovers from the previous night to make vegetarian-friendly burgers and stir fries) and an electricity-generating dancefloor, whereby the more people dance, the more energy they produce,” adds Alijd van Doorn, Doll’s social architecture project manager.

There are currently three pilot dancefloors in development, each using different technology to generate energy. The finished product could work according to pneumatics, mechanical or sensory principles.

“This is not recycling, it’s upcycling,” says Stef. “It’s about finding ways for consumption to generate positive benefits via the interaction between clubbers and the club itself.”

Back at the Catwalk opening party, the dancefloor is a seething mass of designer labels and vodka cocktails. Former record company executive turned club owner Raymond Contein sinks into one of the womb-like booths against the black-and-silver, dragon-design wallpaper and smiles.

“We’ve recycled a dirty space to give people a place to enjoy themselves,” he says.

“Now that’s what I call green clubbing.”

* This is the original story in a series of pieces I wrote about green clubbing Rotterdam. It appeared in the Guardian in 2007. Read the original Reclaim The Beats; read the follow-up story, The Power of Dance.